Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Ellie's Eyes

This post has been a long time coming. I wanted to make sure things were for sure before writing a post about it. You have probably noticed in pictures that Ellie's eyes are a little crossed. At about four months, we noticed that her eyes just weren't straightening out like they are supposed to. Since things like lazy eye run in my family, I immediately became worried. I asked my mom and other people what they thought, and they suggest we get it looked at. I took her into her pediatrician and told her everything we have noticed and how things like this run in my family. She told me that they don't normally look at their eyes until six months but because of our circumstances we should definitely get a second opinion (thank heavens for good doctors.) We scheduled an appointment with Doctor Petersen who is one of the best in the state and just happens to be my sisters eye doctor.

Our worries were confirmed and he told us at the moment her eyes were just far sided (she can't see things up close) but he wasn't too concerned about lazy eye. He wanted to wait until she was nine months to see how things played out, so we scheduled another appointment and waited. We took her in at nine months and the change was so drastic that he suggested we get glasses. She is still just far sided and luckily we aren't looking at lazy eye.....yet. He gave us a prescription and we went to get her glasses ordered. She got them the weekend I ran Ragnar so I wasn't there to see them the first day but they were sending me pictures to let me know how cute she looked in them. We took her again last week and her eyes are showing so much change with the glasses that we don't need to worry about surgery or patching yet. This makes us very happy. We are so thankful for good doctors who didn't just push us aside and really took the time to look at Ellie's eyes. They sooner we get her in glasses the better her eyes will get. Hopefully they continue to work and we don't have to worry about surgery or patching.

She does look pretty dang cute in glasses:

Since getting glasses, many people have asked us questions so I figured I would answer them on here.

How long will she have to wear them? If everything goes as planned and we don't have to deal with surgery or patching, she could be out of glasses completely by the time she is twelve. Just in time for Junior High.

How did the doctors know that her eyes were bad? I have no idea how it works. They measured her lens and other parts of her eye. One thing I do know is that they are excellent at their jobs. They went to school for it so I figure they know what they are doing.

How do you keep them on her? We don't. She has to be really distracted or they come off the minute we put them on. I was working extremely hard to try and keep them on ALL THE TIME. As you can imagine I was exhausted. I told the doctor this and he told me I was working way to much and that as long as she wore them for an hour each day, they would work. Needless to say I am not as stressed.

How are we handling this? I think I am more emotional about it than A.E. but I have surprised myself. I thought I would be way upset but I guess I figure there could be way worse things wrong with her. On a scale of bad this is minimal so we are just thankful for that.